👀 📢 MENEWOOD on sale for $3.99 on all US ebook platforms! I don't know when the promotion started and I don't know how long it'll run but this is the lowest price ever.
You can read more about the book here or just read these luscious quotes 😊
Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing#fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.
Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.
First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.
I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.
Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ] days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.
Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.
"It's embarrassing that MS can't provide 100% backwards compatibility for their own proprietary format." My reason to get [#Libreoffice thread.]
Not that simple.
A #programmer, especially at a big name house costs money, $150k or more, not including bonuses. (I just retired from 39 years #programming at an indie shop.) Maintaining backward compatibility? it's more code to test and—if it fails or causes other #code to fail—debug. It's more code to write again when management changes, changes the programming paradigm, language requirements, storage access, privacy standards, auditablity, or who knows what. It requires at least a dedicated programmer across the supported products, maybe a seasonal team when code changes, and for sure a slice of management time.
100% backward compatibility for what? The vast number of users have no files older than a few years, unlike packrats like me. Max 7 years is a best practice in business. People actually update old files or PDF and archive them. Problem solved.
Moreover... there's always people who work for respect and no money that will do this scut work themselves, maybe because they need to open old files or simply that they can, and make it available for free and nice comments. The LibreOffice dev team, if there is one, sees it as a feature to increase the install base. Remember that they get donations so it's not exactly work for free. If this external programming fails, #Microsoft is more than willing for these people to do tech support, or let them get sued or boycotted—and suck up the bad PR.